Becky GarrisonAtheism Is 'Idol Worship'The Latin root of satire is related to the word for "enough." That's the message of Becky Garrison's newest book about atheism du jour and the bestselling atheist writers Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. The New Atheist Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail: The Misguided Quest to Destroy Your Faith (Thomas Nelson, Jan.) takes on the currently popular unholy trinity, parrying "vitriolic venom with spiritual snark," in the unminced words of the author.New York—based satirist Garrison, whose MySpace page lists her age as 97, wields a prolific pen for a putative nonagenarian. Her Rising from the Ashes: Rethinking Church (Seabury) came out last October, and her first book Red and Blue God, Black and Blue Church: Eyewitness Accounts of How American Churches Are Hijacking Jesus, Bagging the Beatitudes, and Worshipping the Almighty Dollar (Jossey-Bass) was published less than two years ago. She also blogs at God's Politics, a group blog at the multifaith Web site Beliefnet.com. And she keeps her satirical sword keen as senior contributing writer to the Wittenburg Door, the world's largest, oldest and only religious satire magazine."People have told me that in our troubled times we need mystics and satirists," she says. "I think it's sad there are so few satirists around." For the new book, Thomas Nelson asked her to fight atheist fire with satire. "How else do you respond to these blowhards?" she asks. She compares their ambitions to affect public policy to the goals of the religious right during its early years. "They've become the Pat Robertsons of their era," she says. But to Garrison, the atheists have turned atheism into just another false idol that Americans are, paradoxically enough, encouraged to believe in. Not that she defends the institutional Christianity that is a target of the atheists' vehemence. "I rail against the institutional church, but I don't target God himself," she says.Garrison invokes her genes to explain her career. "I'm related to Roger Williams," she says, referring to the 17th-century English religious dissident who founded Rhode Island and championed liberty of conscience. After graduation from Yale and Columbia universities in 1992 with a dual master's degree in divinity and social work, ordination as a minister didn't quite work out. "I started sending out letters, and the only one that responded was the Door." She sold the magazine her first piece, "Beavis and Butthead Are Saved," in 1994 and has enjoyed ongoing professional support from editor Robert Darden.Last year Garrison made two deeply affecting visits to the Middle East. "You start to understand on a visceral level why people would fight for this," she says. "I'm still reflecting on how to cover it." For her, there are a couple of obvious angles. "The Jesus junk they sell is funnier than anything in the U.S.," she says. "Is Jesus up there in heaven saying, 'Dad, I died for this?' "—Marcia Z. NelsonJim Wallis
Waking Up American Christians
The title of Jim Wallis's new book, The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post—Religious Right America (HarperOne, Feb.), is a prophecy as well as a promise.
According to Wallis, a longtime progressive Christian activist, America is on the cusp of another widespread spiritual revival. But this time, it will move beyond personal conversion and individual piety to encompass a demand for social justice that he hopes will be heard all the way to the White House.
"This book is not about taking our faith back from the religious right," Wallis says. "It's about now that we have it back, what do we do with it?"
Wallis has spent much of the past three years traveling the country speaking to people inspired by his bestselling God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It (HarperOne, 2005). In it, he skewered politicians and voters who claim to be Christians, but focus only on abortion and gay marriage, while ignoring the social justice issues that were at the heart of Jesus' ministry.
Now his audiences, filled with people under 30 and many under 25, are spearheading a new political movement—the great awakening of the title—that demands its parties and politicians address poverty, racism, education, health care and human rights.
"People will still vote their values, but they will vote all their values," Wallis predicts. "The candidates who speak in a moral language of politics—not a religious one, which is different—and can speak to the issues that are close to the heart of faith will resonate."
Wallis will tour, with stops in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and cities in between. As part of his social activism, he will also lead revival-type meetings in several cities plagued by social ills, beginning with Columbus, Ohio, in April.
"People often ask me what has changed since God's Politics, and my answer is: everything," he says. "We care about families and health care and I see a galvanization around poverty—about what Jesus said about 'the least of these'—and climate change and human rights and trafficking. There is a tremendous agenda that is growing out there, and I think it is going to affect not just this election but far beyond 2008. I'm very hopeful these days."
—Kimberly Winston
Shane Claiborne
Vote for Jesus in 2008!
Working on the Bush-Quayle campaign of 1992 is not something Shane Claiborne always puts on his résumé, but this first experience in politics made him aware of how his faith and decisions could influence the wider culture.
Claiborne, an activist for peace and social justice and the author of The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical (Zondervan, 2006), grew up in the Bible Belt of east Tennessee where, he says, "Many Christians were concerned with questions of heaven and hell, but not so much with what it looked like to live in this world."
Claiborne's passion for the poor and for leading other Christians to engage the culture thoughtfully began at Eastern College in Pennsylvania and has continued in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, where he is a founding member of the Simple Way, a new monastic community.
Working with Kensington's residents, including a pregnant 14-year-old with few options, helped inspire Claiborne to write Jesus for President (PW starred review, Jan. 28), which goes on sale in March from Zondervan. "I began to understand that the issues and ideologies we talk about such as abortion have human faces. We should never talk about these issues in a vacuum."
Jesus for President—coauthored by Chris Haw, a graduate student in theology and member of an intentional community in Camden, N.J.—explores the social, economic and political order of the Bible, particularly in the time of Jesus. The authors encourage readers to live differently from the secular culture, just as followers of God did in the Old and New Testaments.
"Fundamentally, what does it mean to be the church in this world?" asks Claiborne. "It is a contrast to society: the least are first; the powerful are cast from their thrones; and the peacemakers are the children of God. It's a beautiful thing for us to look in Scripture and see people with a different imagination than the world they're living in."
Claiborne mentions the Amish in Nickel Mines, Pa., and how they showered gifts and support on the murderer's family in the wake of shootings that took the lives of five girls from their community. "Can you imagine if the Amish were in charge of the war on terror?" asks Claiborne.
As the election nears and issues of war and economics loom large, Claiborne and Haw will be traveling across the country promoting their book and exhorting fellow Christians to take a road less traveled regardless of political affiliation. "Not only is the reputation of America at stake, but also a representation of Christianity," says Claiborne.
—Amy Tracy
Ron Sider
Reinventing Evangelical Politics
Ron Sider has long kept a critical eye on the way his fellow evangelical Christians live out their faith in the political arena. His 1977 Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving from Affluence to Generosity (Thomas Nelson) was a polemic against a me-focused Christianity, and it changed the way many put their faith into practice.
Now, in The Scandal of Evangelical Politics: Why Are Christians Missing the Chance to Really Change the World? (Baker Academic, Feb.), Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action, offers what he hopes will be a road map for people of faith to discover deeper and broader religious principles they can carry into the voting booth.
"One critique of evangelical politics has been its ready, fire, aim approach," he says. "We have to ask what God cares about, and have a far more sophisticated political philosophy than we have had. This book is my attempt at laying out a good methodology."
That methodology includes a reexamination of the scriptures for core biblical principles. Is God more concerned with personal morality or widespread poverty? With nuclear families or nuclear reactors? The next step, Sider says, is applying those principles to a study of the world.
Sider hopes the result will be a revitalization of both faith and politics in a new faith-based political center, one he sees solidifying around new, generally younger evangelical leaders like bestselling author and pastor Rick Warren. "Warren cares a lot about poverty in Africa and elsewhere, torture, care for creation, HIV/AIDS," Sider says. "He reflects a massive change in the evangelical center, which is embracing this much broader, biblically balanced agenda."
This new evangelical political philosophy is something Sider has been thinking about and writing about for 30 years.
"In a significant way, the book represents the cycle of my own life," he says of work that spans 1973's Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern and 2004's Evangelical Call for Social Action. Both are considered major manifestos of progressive Christianity and continue to shape evangelical thought.
"I have never thought that politics [was] the only way to change the world," Sider says, "but I have always thought that one way you love your neighbor is to help politics get it more right."
—Kimberly Winston